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Monday, July 22, 2013

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

“US, THEN” by Vincent
O’Sullivan (Victoria University Press,
$NZ28)

I will begin like an unpoetic
fool by giving you the statistics.

Vincent O’Sullivan’s latest
collection Us, then contains 78
poems. They are divided into three sections. Now why should I bother to mention
this, as if I were a conscientious bibliographer rather than a reviewer?
Because the way poems are arranged in a new book always bothers me, that’s why.
I am always afraid that I will miss some subtle connections, some stylistic or
thematic reason for the arrangement - in this case into three sections.

Three weeks ago, reviewing on
this blog Ian Wedde’s The Lifeguard
and Elizabeth Smither’s The Blue Coat,
I noted how one volume consisted of long sequences of poems thematically
linked; while the other appeared to me to be a volume of individual poems,
albeit expressive of the poet’s typical concerns. My own inclination is always
to read each poem as an individual thing in itself. So why is
Us, then arranged as it is? Maybe it simply means that Vincent O’Sullivan
liked them in this order, or wrote them in this order? But I plunge in and
proceed to confuse myself by seeking to find the links.

The first section (of 22 poems)
seems to wrestle with matters of perception and belief. The poem “According to the doco” considers
how a snake-handler sees a vicious snake (unlike the way you or I would see
it). “Speech Day” begins with the words “There
is more to the eye than meets it”, a veritable motto of subjective
rationalism. “Cruise ship Afternoon” has our poetic narrator looking at and not
understanding an American tourist and commenting “How / much goes on behind our fences, / our palisades, our ungift of
tongues.” We think we are the pinnacle of creation, but in “Against the
Drift”, nature is indifferent to us, no matter how dramatic we think the works
of nature are. In the poem “And”, at least as I read it, the Platonic,
rationalist mind holds the sensual moment in check. All this concerns the mode
of perception.

And then there are those matters
of belief, of styles of religion living or dead. “Cross over wise guys”, for
example, reconstructs the moment when the certainties of the old Roman Empire
and its gods crumble, and this new Christian stuff is establishing itself.
“Nice try”, a poem about Rasputin, does the same for the old Russian Empire,
where the winter ice is about to crack. In “Well, not this afternoon”, the old
gods are given another spin before being gently set aside; while “Freedom”
gives the stark alternative of God or no God. Then there’s that matter of
perception again when, in “This time in 3-D” O’Sullivan protests, as I do,
against the uninvolving special effects of new movie computer wizardry, at the
sight of which “I yearn for a piece of
human flesh stabbing / for dear life at another piece. I want us / as we’ve
always been. I want Reality / for God’s sake, the way it was trickily made.”
God – and how we see things – neatly yoked in one poem.

So, in reading these first 22 poems,
I have cleverly nailed down what O’Sullivan is on about, haven’t I?

In fact, I have done no such
thing, as I have merely cherry-picked poems of like interest. I have ignored
the fact that the volume’s first section also contains “Uninvited Tribute”,
eight poems as homage to Allen Curnow of whom O’Sullivan writes in his intro “a not altogether likeable man (I knew him
only slightly), but our finest poet.”I will commit an act of cowardice as a reviewer by saying that how you
respond to this sequence will depend on how well you know Curnow’s work.

By the time I read the volume’s
second section (of 28 poems), I think I see a theme of faith under stress in a
new world in poems such as “That time of year” or “Imago: Three” (does Darwin
de-sacralise the world?) or “Act Five”. There are tilts at new technologies in
“Infra-red” and “Only connect”; while “On the pleasure of former colleagues”
and “From the ‘Culture’ column” could basically be tilts at current
intellectual trends. The poem “Trade aid” certainly wonders if high culture is
worth a damn in the workaday world. (And which nerdy intellectual hasn’t spent
at least some time wondering if the honest tradesman isn’t being more creative
than the writing fool?)

But my attempts to sort out the
book’s thematic order are floundering. When I get to the third section (of 28
poems) I’m defeated. I can only suppose the poet has gathered them into this
order because he damned well wants to. But I do see poems facing each other
across opposite pages that deal with cognate themes. For example “Fine
distinctions” (on p.84) and “Nothing truer, mind” (on p.85) both approach
philosophy in terms of its academic propositions and their relation to sensual
experience. And yet the poem “Random as” takes us back to the matter of
perception – in this case, a child’s moment of not-quite-understanding adult
reality, but knowing it is not reality as explained by adults. And the poem
“Not included in the footnotes” is another tussle with implacable Yahweh in the
Old Testament. And the book’s title poem “Us, then” once again wonders how
secure we are as kings of creation.

I admit it. I can see how some
individual poems are connected with other individual poems, but I can’t see the
overall structure of the volume.

So, this not being the place for
lengthy exegeses of individual poems, I’m forced back into generalizations.

First and most obvious – this is
a book of experience, not innocence; and experience means an awareness that
life is short and time’s winged chariot is doing its business and closing time
isn’t too far away. “Words to Attend” seeks words “which I’d like to sign off on”. “News from out the Heads” tells us
that age and youth don’t see things the same way. In “Screensaver”, grandfather
poet reflects that life is short. The erotic impulse is being burnt out in “Spacing
out, they will tell you”.“Still” is
most definitely a poem about ending and “one’s
dying / to know who played me, the man / one has almost been, at least / in
that other epic, the one whose / script one implied if not performed - / the
man who picks off the copper- / heads at twenty paces, the Armani / cuffs at
another locale, lord of / visible realms….” Mortality, reminiscence and the
grim reaper are featured players. The poem “After reading the warnings” gives
us mortality in the habit of smoking; “Listen, this isn’t easy”, using the
conceit of an earthquake, has an ageing couple talk and feel their infirmities
creeping in. “Ciao!” is literally about the earth-to-earth at a funeral.
“Closer though than one may think” approaches death like a dream monologue; and
“As one does, alas, cobber” is definitely a closing time poem. At least two
other poems sound the chimes at midnight and babble of green fields by
recalling films seen in childhood.

Second, there are poems of erotic
love, which point to the limitations of poetry, none better than “Love,
assuming nothing”.

Third – and this has always been
one of O’Sullivan’s strongest suits – these are poems of metrical skill with an
ear for sounds and the patterns of sound (which, dear reader, is not as common
in current poetry as one would hope). Knowing fully where this craft stands in
the current hierarchy of critical respect, O’Sullivan sometimes chooses
traditional forms. “Getting the Picture” is in rhyming iambic pentameters. The
lines of “Against the Drift” are longer than alexandrines and are rhymed
couplets. Rhymed couplets are used with satirical intent in “As the boy, the
man”. There are triplets of rhymes in “That time of year”. A sequence of 17
four-lined observations is called “Loose Change”, being separate and variously
wry and satirical brief observations something like the “Shorts” W.H. Auden put
in his collected poems. But then there’s nothing “loose” about these pithy
rhymed ones. In “Guests are invited to consider”, O’Sullivan notes that “one takes the risk of rhyme” even though
“one may be shelved near McGonagall”.
This is a statement of belief in the traditional craft of poetry. As for
the purpose of poetry, its ability to flash and dazzle is defended in
“Puritan Sunday”.

Having done little more in this
review than name-check and tick off some of the book’s contents, with brief
asides, I will conclude with the unacceptable game of choosing favourites. The
historian and New Zealander in me read and re-read with delight and engagement
“Nowhere further from Belgium”, it being a bleak and effective presentation of
small-town New Zealand and its war memorials, and the inherited mythology of
them both. And, fortuitously (or by design?) facing it on the opposite page,
there is “The incentives, south”, with that yearning New Zealand impulse
towards somewhere else, as seen in indifferent clouds. Brilliant.

For the record, I read out loud
O’Sullivan’s very rude “Only connect” at the dinner table, where it got the
intended laugh from my teenage daughters. Than which no poet can aspire to
greater recognition.